Unknowable Archive

Beyond Chalken Roost
Campaign Pitch

by Julienne Bertrand

Posted December 5^th, 2024

In this campaign, you all play as natives of, or recent immigrants to, the small island port town of Chalken Roost. The town has fallen on hard times, and is the lone outpost of human civilization on a mostly unexplored island, harboring many secrets. Your characters are even more down on their luck than most, and so have taken to the likely deadly, but possibly lucrative career of adventurers.

In terms of characterization, I only need you to be able to answer one question about your character up front: why are they adventuring instead of getting a real job? You'll also need to choose your starting class(es), and you can roll or pick a starting skill from your class. Your character also has two other background skills, but you can decide on those later.

This is first and foremost a dungeon crawling campaign in a gritty magical fantasy setting, with a bit of wilderness exploration to tie it together. You'll be expected to think creatively to navigate hostile monsters and people, traps, and weird underground nonsense in pursuit of cool treasure. Combat is part of this, but you may well be able to avoid a fight through fast talking, clever use of the environment, stealth, and trickery. You should do this if you can, because fighting is dangerous, and someone could get hurt.

I don't plan to be vicious towards your characters. If something is dangerous, I'll almost always try to broadcast that, but your characters can die easily if you get overconfident and bite off more than you can chew.

I intend this to be a sandbox. I'm not writing a story, I'm simulating a world, and doing my best to fill it with interesting things to poke, but it's up to you to decide what you want to do in it.

Once we get started, I want to pursue a 'west marches' style of campaign. This means:

• I will provide rumours, adventure hooks and the like outside of the game, through discord.
• You, the players, will be responsible for choosing which adventure to pursue. You will coordinate with other players and let me know when you all want to play, within my posted availability. You certainly don't need to get everyone on board for every adventure, but try to get at least three players.
• Each session should begin and end in Chalken Roost. I will give a warning when you ought to be wrapping it up. If your party doesn't make it back to the safety of civilization by the end of the session, we can schedule a follow-up before we part ways, if everyone can agree on a date, otherwise, your characters will probably suffer some random Bad Stuff on the way back home.
• Outside of adventures, time will pass in game at a one to one ratio with real life, and we can coordinate downtime activities, shopping for gear, and whatnot through discord, or at the end of a session, time permitting. If your character is still out on an adventure when you want to play again, you can always roll up a new one, and in fact, i encourage players to keep multiple characters.

A Brief Overview of The Game System

• The core mechanic here, when the result of an attempted action is in doubt is to roll a d20 against an attribute. If the result is equal or less than the attribute, you've succeeded. Skills and circumstances can grant you one or more advantages or disadvantages, which grant you additional rolls, keeping only the best with advantage, or worst with disadvantage.
• Characters have five core attributes: Strength (STR), Knowledge (KNO), Willpower (WIL), Agility (AGI) and Perception (PER).
• characters are human by default; non-human species' are classes of their own
• multi-classing is expected and commonplace
• you get access to two 'templates' at first level, essentially allowing you to multiclass right out the gate, and you get another template at 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level. Each level thereafter, you can swap a previous template for a new one, allowing you to retrain into a new class.
• you also gain extra Heart (HRT) up to 4th level. this is essentially Farther Afield's equivalent to HP
• after 4th level, your character won't gain much power or toughness from leveling. instead you'll have to gain power from wealth, connections, knowledge, mutations, divine blessings, magic items, and so forth.